Books by Máté Zombory
Budapest: Kijárat, 2019
A politikai képviselet állami intézményrendszerének romjai között felüti a fejét az emlékezetpoli... more A politikai képviselet állami intézményrendszerének romjai között felüti a fejét az emlékezetpolitika, amelyben osztályalapú tömegpártok helyett az elismerés politikusai küzdenek egymással. A késő-modern traumatársadalom áldozati csoportokra tagolódik, amelyek között a történelem során elszenvedett sérelmek presztízskülönbségei teremtenek egyenlőtlen viszonyokat. A státuszcsoportok a szenvedés hivalkodó reprezentációja révén versengenek egymással, ami jellemzően az áldozatok számában fejeződik ki. Azáltal, hogy hangot és elismerést követelnek az állítólagosan hallgatásba burkolózó áldozatok számára, az őket nyilvánosan képviselő szereplők politikai cselekvőt, csoportot hoznak létre a képviseltek sokaságából. E kötet a politika e mélyreható, 1970-es évek óta tartó átalakulásával foglalkozik: a nép nevében történő politizálástól az áldozatok nevében folytatott politika felé történő elmozdulást diagnosztizálja. Arra az ellentmondásra keresi a magyarázatot, hogy a sorozatos, a megbékélést célzó elismerési gesztusok ellenére újra és újra kiújulnak az emlékezetpolitikai konfliktusok.
L'Harmattan, 2011
A könyv megjelenését a Nemzeti Kulturális Alap támogatta.
Edited Volumes by Máté Zombory
Tér-idő történelem. Holokauszt-emlékezet és transznacionális politika I. Transznacionális emlékez... more Tér-idő történelem. Holokauszt-emlékezet és transznacionális politika I. Transznacionális emlékezet Henry Rousso: Hogyan válik globálissá az emlékezet? Andreas Huyssen: Jelenlévő múltak. Média, politika, amnézia Pierre Nora: A politikától veszélyeztetett történelem II. Holokauszt-emlékezet és a transznacionális tér Jeffrey C. Alexander: Holokauszt és trauma: Morális univerzalizmus Nyugaton Daniel Levy, Natan Sznaider: Határtalan emlékezés. A holokauszt és a kozmopolita emlékezet kialakulása Aleida Assmann: A holokauszt-globális emlékezet? Egy új emlékezetközösség kiterjedtsége és korlátai Marianne Hirsch: Túlélő képek. Holokausztfotók és az utóemlékezet munkája James E. Young: Az emlékhely-építészet kísérteties remeke. Daniel Libeskind Zsidó Múzeuma Berlinben III. Kritikák és kérdőjelek Michael Rothberg: Gázától Varsóig. A többirányú emlékezet feltérképezése David Cesarani: A "hallgatás mítoszának" megkérdőjelezése. Háború utáni reakciók az európai zsidóság pusztulására Regine Robin-Maire: Az emlékezet szétágazásai A kötet megjelenését a Nemzeti Kulturális Alap és az MTA Társadalomtudományi Kutatóközpont Szociológiai Intézete támogatta.
Befejezetlen Múlt Alapítvány, 2014
Papers by Máté Zombory
Understanding Central Europe, 2017
Chantal Akerman's film, D'Est, makes a journey from eastern Germany, across Poland and the Baltic... more Chantal Akerman's film, D'Est, makes a journey from eastern Germany, across Poland and the Baltics, to Moscow, from the end of summer to an ice cold winter. Presenting scenes from everyday life in the former Eastern Bloc in 1993 in a neutral style, without comment, narration or dialogue, the film shows the "real" Eastern Europe; yet in a way, that is somehow disturbing. The title, together with the journey of the camera, quickly brings into play the familiar image of the hierarchical relation in which the positive West assumes the role of a model for the negative East, the latter taking the position of the good student: the developing economy or the democratizing mentality. However, the journey that Akerman's film retraces does not slide toward barbarism. With their lightness of touch, the film's visual representations, pictures of city streets, apartment interiors or faces of people waiting in a bus terminal, jar with the popular image of "the East". Immediately after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the viewers are left alone with the troubling pictures of a journey eastwards, pictures which are not stable and given, but uncertain and mobile just like the tracking shots in the film, when the camera effectively never stops moving. It is precisely this movement in relation to which the stability of geographic positions can be represented. The concept of Central Europe, redefined and propagated among others by Kundera in the 1980s, is a good example of the popular geographic imaginary mentioned above. For Kundera, the part of Europe that is situated geographically in the center is "culturally in the West and politically in the East" (Kundera 1984: 33). Eastern Europe is not European, because of the conception of the East. The tragedy of Central Europe is that "After 1945, the border between the two Europes shifted several hundred kilometers to the west, and several nations that had always considered themselves to be Western woke up to discover that they were now in the East" (Kundera 1984: 33). It is thus the historical displacement of the East-West border of civilizations, in relation to which the concept of Central Europe is formulated. According to Kundera's expectations of the early 1980s with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the border would at one blow shift back to where it was originally and the nations that always considered themselves as Western would finally find themselves in the West, that is, in Europe. The "essential tragedy" of Central Europe -that its countries "have vanished from the map of the West" would be over. What is not over is the process of 15031-1209d-1pass-r02.
Journal of Genocide Research , 2024
This paper focuses on the memory activism of three survivors of the Auschwitz resistance and expl... more This paper focuses on the memory activism of three survivors of the Auschwitz resistance and explores the ways in which they linked fascism and genocide to economic exploitation. By doing so, our paper excavates a leftist-antifascist paradigm of postwar memory that waned with the advent of contemporary Holocaust culture. We analyse the memoirs of Oszkár Betlen, Bruno Baum, and Hermann Langbein, members of the international communist movement before, during, and after the Second World War. For these authors, calls to remember Auschwitz were inseparable from a struggle for social change in the present, and their memory practice was never restricted to writing. Therefore, our paper places their memoirs into the wider context of their political-organizational work, and shows that their efforts to commemorate Auschwitz responded to some pressing issues of their time, including the re-militarization and NATO-membership of the Federal Republic, reparations, amnesty and reintegration of former Nazis, and war crimes trials. Importantly, all these issues were intertwined with what they regarded as capitalist restoration and a looming resurgence of fascism. Our paper argues that the so-called economic case was central to their postwar campaigning because they believed that economic exploitation was central to fascism and had wide-ranging implications for postwar societies as well. Furthermore, we challenge the prevailing view on antifascism by demonstrating that for these authors the economic aspect of fascism did not eclipse the genocidal character of fascism and the specifically Jewish experience of it. In contrast to some Marxist historians, they did not see genocidal policies as merely derivative or secondary either. Rather, these leftist-antifascists commemorated Auschwitz in ways which regarded economic exploitation and genocide as interrelated and constitutive aspects of fascism.
Holocaust Memory and the Cold War Remembering across the Iron Curtain, 2024
Through the analysis of Hungarian director Zoltán Fábri's 1967 film and its international recepti... more Through the analysis of Hungarian director Zoltán Fábri's 1967 film and its international reception, the paper explores the politics and aesthetics of antifascist memory of the Holocaust.
Seeking Accountability for Nazi and War Crimes in East and Central Europe, Oct 25, 2022
Memory Studies, 2023
Our article responds to the ongoing crisis of memory politics that has brought the problem of de-... more Our article responds to the ongoing crisis of memory politics that has brought the problem of de-politicization of memory studies scholarship to the forefront. This reflexivity is manifested in the demand for theories that explicitly address the problems of politics and solidarity. A representative theory in this regard is Michael Rothberg's multidirectional memory that examines "the Holocaust in the age of decolonization" and offers a non-exclusive model of public remembering and reconciliation. While we acknowledge Rothberg's attempt to overcome the "competition paradigm" of contemporary memory, we argue that the model of multidirectional memory as a politico-ethical framework of solidarity ultimately fails because of its underlying social ontology and presentist-ahistorical method of interpretation. We give a critical analysis of his model while applying the same historical and empirical focus. By doing so, we show that the direct theoretical link between memory and solidarity is the outcome of a de-politicization of the historical record. Ultimately, we make a case for Leftist-antifascist internationalism, a paradigm he misidentified as multidirectional Holocaust memory.
Memory Studies, 2022
The article challenges the widely shared thesis in memory studies that the antifascist memory of ... more The article challenges the widely shared thesis in memory studies that the antifascist memory of the Second World War suppressed the Holocaust. Instead of exploring exceptions to this rule by looking for single cases of antifascist memory that represent some aspects of the Holocaust, we argue that antifascist memory presented a distinct cultural regime for remembering the past. Our claim is that antifascist memory, understood as a particular historical phenomenon on a transnational scale, opened up specific ways to commemorate the Jewish genocide. Our article relies on two pillars: first, on recent memory studies scholarship that challenged "the myth of silence" in relation to the postwar decades; second, on recent studies revisiting antifascism itself, demonstrating its transnational and ideologically diverse nature. We argue that a contested but at least until the 1970s still commonly held pan-European antifascist legacy fostered not only intra-Eastern bloc but also cross-Cold War mnemonic cooperation. We present an empirical comparative study that discusses the 1965 Hungarian exhibition at the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Hungarian section at the permanent exhibition at the Museum of the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr in Paris that opened in the same year. Based on archival documents in Budapest, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Paris, we prove that both exhibitions displayed a coherent, historically accurate, and comprehensive account of the genocide that articulated unambiguously the Jewish identity of those perished and persecuted. At the same time, they both operated under discursive conditions informed by antifascist legacies in Poland, Hungary, and France.
Documentation historique pendant la guerre froide. L’histoire du livre de Jenő Lévai, Eichmann en Hongrie (1961)
Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, 2021
This study reconstructs the history of Hungarian journalist Jenő Lévai’s book Eichmann in Hungary... more This study reconstructs the history of Hungarian journalist Jenő Lévai’s book Eichmann in Hungary published in the political context of the Jerusalem trial in 1961. By doing so, it will shed light on the historically given social conditions of historical documentation, particularly on the institutional aspects of the actor’s agency and the political context. This perspective has two major characteristics. First, it follows the subject of Lévai as a person in preparing the book, focusing especially on the relationship he nurtured with the Hungarian authorities. Second, it deals with the trajectory of his manuscript from submission to publication. This dual focus sheds light on how large-scale Cold War tensions influenced individual action in a Socialist country regarding the historical documentation of Nazi atrocities. The paper argues for a complex understanding of the Cold War context as it created opportunities to research and obtain historical documentation of the Jewish genocide in the first place.
REVUE D ETUDES COMPARATIVES EST-OUEST 51 : 2-3 pp. 21-54., 2020
Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, this article argues that the field of the political debates ... more Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, this article argues that the field of the political debates about Europe’s “constitutive historical legacies” was characterised by two positions, both inherently anti-communist: the cosmopolitan Holocaust memory framework of the post-Cold War Wes- tern European “integrator position” and the heroic-national memory frame- work of post-Communist countries “returning to Europe.” The interaction of these two positions was influenced by the conditionality of the enlargement process. The debate was thus not de-politicised, as often stated, but consen- sually anti-communist. The pan-European anti-communist moment hindered politico-ideological framings and changed political struggles into a mimetic competition between self-victimising actors in which claims were moralised and restricted to anti-communism.
Revue d'études comparatives est-ouest, 2020
Presses Universitaires de France | « Revue d'études comparatives Est-Ouest » 2020/2 N° 2-3 | page... more Presses Universitaires de France | « Revue d'études comparatives Est-Ouest » 2020/2 N° 2-3 | pages 55 à 88Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Presses Universitaires de France. © Presses Universitaires de France. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) © Presses Universitaires de France | Téléchargé le 17/11/2020 sur www.cairn.info par via Université de Strasbourg (IP: 82.123.23.103) © Presses Universitaires de France | Téléchargé le 17/11/2020 sur www.cairn.info par via Université de Strasbourg (IP: 82.123.23.103)
In: Understanding Central Europe, Routledge, 2018, 32-43
Why are there more "Center of Europe" monuments on the eastern half of the continent?
Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics (6):1: 4-7, 2020
Editorial for Intersections EEJSP special issue (6):1 2020
Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics (6)1: 8-26, 2020
In this article, we present how the recognition framework of political and historic representatio... more In this article, we present how the recognition framework of political and historic representation has enabled reactionary political forces, which increasingly recognize its inner contradictions and turn them against the basic principle of universal dignity, with the clear aim of corroding the whole recognition political edifice from the inside out. Taking the field of the symbolic construction of European identity as our main focus, we will reconstruct how the takeover of recognition politics has destabilized political and historic representation in Europe and ended up undermining European integration rather than enhancing it. Following one of the most important theorists of political and historic representation, Frank Ankersmit, we introduce the conceptual distinction between antifoundationalist vs. foundationalist representation in order to account for the series of decisive institutional changes that since the 1970s have contributed to the intersection of two separate fields into 'memory politics' and led to the rise of a new and inherently non-democratic foundationalism, of which recognition politics is one of the main symptoms.
SHOAH: INTERVENTION METHODS DOCUMENTATION (SIMON) 7 : 1 pp. 100-117., 2020
Utószezon (Late Season) is a 1967 Hungarian film by Zoltán Fábri, based on the nove... more Utószezon (Late Season) is a 1967 Hungarian film by Zoltán Fábri, based on the novel Esti Gyors (Evening Express) by György Rónay.In a provincial Hungarian town around the time of the Eichmann trial, a group of old men, who represent the social elite from before 1945, is killing time. The group decides to play a practical joke on their friend Kálmán Kerekes and to scare him with a fictitious police summons. However, Kerekes does not react as expected. He does not drive to the police precinct but to another town, where he visits the local pharmacy where he worked as an assistant during the Second World War. This is because the summons reminded him of his words – “Unless the Szilágyis...” – which in 1944 led to the arrest and murder of his former employer, who had been hiding under an assumed name. When discovered by his friends, Kerekes demands a judgment of his past behaviour. The result is an improvised midnight trial. One part of the group find him not guilty on all counts while another – a survivor – opines that the death penalty is called for. Kerekes genuinely wants to give himself up to the police, yet they have no understanding for his motivation. His attempt to account for his past fails, ultimately no one lives up to this moral reckoning, and there is no solution ...Utószezon today numbers among the forgotten or hardly acknowledged works on the Holocaust, yet it reveals interesting aspects of the politics of memory in the Kádár era. At the same time, the film illustrates Zoltán Fábris’s approach – still a strange approach by present standards of Holocaust memory – which places the question of guilt and coresponsibility in a larger context. To Fábris, the contemporary societal relevance of his themes and their meaning for the present were more important than empty memorial rituals.
Connexe: Les espaces postcommunistes en question(s), 2019
This article proposes to reconsider the relation between populism and democracy. Instead of takin... more This article proposes to reconsider the relation between populism and democracy. Instead of taking democracy as a given, it will study populism in the context of democratization in a case study from a historical sociological perspective. The post-war and pre-Cold War historical context is analyzed here on the example of Hungary. First, I analyze the public debate on democracy in order to map out the discursive field in which the different political positions were taken. I show that the debate was about the legitimate definition of the political community, the demos. Second, I situate the political wing of the Hungarian populist movement in this discursive field. I establish that the position of the populists’ party did not differ considerably from the standpoint of the other participants: the basic populist claims and references were articulated as part of the problem of democracy. Third, I analyze the continuity of the populist tradition in the context of the post-war redefinition of the ethnoscape, that is, in relation to the “Jewish question” and the “German question”.
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Books by Máté Zombory
Edited Volumes by Máté Zombory
Papers by Máté Zombory